Ensemble Studios had spent almost a decade mastering the real-time technique style when it grew to become a sufferer of its personal success. Its 1997 debut, Age of Empires, had been an immediate hit and spawned a number of beloved sequels and expansions that cemented the studio’s glowing fame. Imitators—some novel, some slavish—rapidly appeared of their droves, and by the mid-2000s, father or mother firm Microsoft anticipated nothing of the studio apart from to construct on its legacy with one other recreation in the identical vein.
The one downside: Ensemble wasn’t a lot . “We had been making an attempt for therefore lengthy to do something however an RTS recreation,” says Dave Pottinger, a veteran of the studio who labored there throughout its lifespan. “If we had been going to do one other one, one thing needed to change.” An thought was floated: persist with the RTS format on which the group had constructed its fame, however go away PCs behind to make a recreation for consoles. Ensemble would have one thing new to chew on, and Microsoft can be left comfortable. Or so that they hoped.
“Everybody there thought it was a catastrophically horrible thought,” says Pottinger. “We had by no means designed a console recreation, a lot much less a console RTS, they usually did not actually exist again then.” With Ensemble having already spent a few years creating an unique IP and prototyping concepts, Microsoft gave the studio an ultimatum: rework the sport right into a tie-in for the most important Xbox franchise of the day, or scrap the entire thing. “In the event that they had been gonna take an opportunity on a console RTS, it needed to be tied to Halo,” says Pottinger. “That was the one means they thought it might promote.”
And promote it did. When Halo Wars hit cabinets in 2009, it offered 1 million copies in beneath a month. It was the type of industrial success any developer can be proud of, largely pushed, Pottinger admits, by the Halo model.
But had been these Microsoft executives to take a look at Ensemble’s unique console RTS at this time, they might be extra approving. In a far cry from its early years, console technique gaming is the healthiest it’s ever been. Knotty grand-strategy titles equivalent to Crusader Kings III sit alongside the extra approachable likes of Minecraft Legends, action-focused video games like Aliens: Darkish Descent, the extra standard real-time battlefields of Firm of Heroes 3, and administration simulators like Two Level Campus. Simply this yr, Ensemble’s PC basic Age of Empires 2 was ported to Xbox platforms with a bespoke gamepad management scheme, and Age of Empires 4 adopted go well with solely final month.
It speaks, partly, to the final homogenization of the medium. “The road between consoles and PC gaming goes away,” says Lewis Ward, gaming analysis director at market analysis agency IDC. He notes that seven of the ten top-grossing video games on Steam final yr are additionally obtainable on consoles, and publishers themselves are more and more blurring platform distinctions. Sony has ported a number of of its largest PlayStation exclusives to PC up to now few years, together with conventional console mascots like Ratchet & Clank and Sackboy. And the launch of the Steam Deck has allowed gamers to entry the world’s largest PC storefront via a console-style gadget.
Previously, {hardware} disparities have been a serious headache for multiplatform builders, as giant chunks of a recreation must be tweaked to help the bespoke processes and methods of every console. “These days the CPUs and different {hardware} are literally surprisingly related between all of them,” says Ben Hymers, technical director on Two Level Campus. “Some platforms are extra highly effective than others, however the precise core structure of issues is about the identical.”
